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Conservation easements are voluntary legal agreements designed to constrain land-use activities on private land to achieve conservation goals. Extensive public and private funding has been used to establish 'working forest' conservation easements (WFCE) that aim to protect conservation values while maintaining commercial timber production. We use variation in the timing and location of easements to estimate the impacts of WFCEs in Maine from a 33-year time-series of forest loss and harvesting. We find that WFCEs had negligible impacts on an already low rate of forest loss. Compared to matched control areas, easements decreased forest loss by 0.0004% yr−1 (95% CI: −0.0008, to −0.00003%) the equivalent of 3.17 ha yr−1 (95% C.I.: 1.6, to 6.7 ha yr−1) when scaled to the 839 142 ha of total conserved area. In contrast, WFCEs increased the rate of harvesting by 0.37% yr−1 (95% CI: 0.11%–0.63%), or 3,105 ha yr−1 (95% C.I.: 923–5,287 ha yr−1) when scaled to the conserved area. However, more recently established easements contained stricter restrictions on harvest practices and stricter easements reduced harvest by 0.66% yr−1 (95% CI: −1.03, −0.29). Our results suggest that future easements could be more effective if they were targeted to higher risk of loss areas and included additional provisions for harvest restrictions and monitoring. 

Abstract Substantial funding is being allocated to new land protection and access to protected open space for marginalized communities is a crucial concern. Using New England as a study area, we show striking disparities in the distribution of protected open space across multiple dimensions of social marginalization. Using a quartile-based approach within states, we find that communities in the lowest income quartile have just 52% as much nearby protected land as those in the most affluent quartile. Similarly, communities with the highest proportions of people of color have just 47% as much protected land as those in the lowest quartile. These disparities persist across both public and private protected land, within urban, exurban and rural communities, for different sized buffers around communities, and across time. To help address these disparities in future conservation plans, we develop a screening tool to identify and map communities with high social marginalization and low nearby protected open space within each state. We then show that areas prioritized according to these environmental justice (EJ) criteria are substantially different from areas prioritized according to conventional conservation criteria. This demonstrates how incorporating EJ criteria in conservation prioritization processes could shift patterns of future land protection. Our work provides methods that can be used broadly across regions to inform conservation efforts.